All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve

Author:Anita Shreve [Shreve, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Adult, Historical
ISBN: 9780316735735
Publisher: San Val
Published: 2002-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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As it happened, Asher did not come to dinner that Sunday, or on the Sunday after that, owing to the fact that William Bliss died the Friday following our breakfast at the Hotel Thrupp, and Etna and I had perforce to enter a period of mourning. Etna was understandably distraught, and I was required to remain close to home for the better part of a week to comfort her. She found some solace in her sister Miriam, who came up from Exeter to attend the service. (Pippa, Etna’s other sister, was visiting her husband’s family in Chicago and did not attend.) Keep, Miriam’s husband, came with his wife, and, of course, the couple stayed with us. I did not care for Josip Keep, but in such a situation, one is more generous of spirit than one might be otherwise. Besides, I was not at all unhappy to dispel the image of my boorish and unconfident intrusion into their household on that long-ago Sunday morning. Though Miriam had visited yearly for a weeklong stay each time, Josip Keep had not accompanied her to Thrupp; and while I had no illusions regarding his impression of the village (“Dreadful,” he pronounced it upon arriving), I thought he might at least be impressed with our house. (In fact, he was not: “I wonder, Van Tassel, that you did not situate the house so that it avoided the dismal prospect of those granite mountains,” he said.

“It was already situated,” I answered, seething.)

The funeral was impressive, with the Reverend Mr. Frederick Stimson delivering a personal and moving homily on the benevolent brilliance of our Physics Professor. Etna wept copiously (her sister Miriam did not; indeed, she appeared hardly to have known the man), and I, too, felt the masculine lump in the throat that will lodge when tears are not seemly. I was moved by Etna’s obvious grief, by my affection for William Bliss (quite genuine; it had, after all, been in his house that I had come to know Etna), and by the memory of our wedding, fourteen years earlier, in that very same chapel, a memory further enhanced by the recollection of that first fluttering kiss with my wife. The chapel was filled to overflowing with mourners. I had not known that Bliss had been held in such affection, though I might have guessed; he was a gentle man with a keen mind in a difficult field. Following the ceremony, there was a buffet luncheon at the home of Evelyn Bliss, who appeared visibly exhausted from the effort of tending to her husband during his illness and then having to watch him die.

Etna and I stood in the hallway of the Bliss residence, greeting the mourners who had come to have a meal (a bizarre custom, I often think: who wants to partake of food following a death, which inevitably leads to an unhappy contemplation of one’s own?). Occasionally, Etna would leave my side when freshets of grief threatened to embarrass her, and it was after an exceptionally long absence that I went to find her.

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